Zak

I won’t eat food that I haven’t personally planted, watered, harvested, reared and slaughtered myself - because anything else is just cheating.
Also, I won’t allow anyone to give me medicines I haven’t personally researched, synthesized, and tested on a score of beagles myself. Same reason.
We shouldn’t all be experts in everything: it’s not efficient. We’re better off with specialists doing the hard work in each area. As a mech eng, I price my time higher than the extra money I spend on an Arduino, the electrical power it wastes, and slower execution than some other chip. Increasing the efficiency of the doodad I’m building is of tiny benefit and takes weeks compared to what, spending another 45 minutes at work actually being productive for other people and getting paid more than enough to grab an Arduino that just works. Being able to grab the code and circuits I need off the shelf (the community-stocked shelf) and bodge it up to what I want is perfect.

Wow - just looked at the Ping sensors: they’re rubbish compared to the Maxbotix ones.
Have just hooked my EZ0 up to an Arduino - one of the easiest doodads I’ve ever used with it. It was more work (MUCH more work) to set up the 4x7-segment display as a readout.
Using PWM is easy on the Arduino, too. The pulseIn function handles everything nicely.

No, they’ll NEVER stop whining. They’ll complain it wasn’t enough of a gift, or it wasn’t what they wanted, or they should have got a voucher so they could have chosen, or they shouldn’t have got a voucher because it’s not quite enough to get what they want and now they have to spend their own money too, or shipping takes too long, or it’s just an ‘insult’, or - even if they can’t think of any way it’s no good for them, they’ll start complaining about other people - too many other people got it who weren’t deserving, or not enough other people got it, or other people got theirs first.

They were pretty open about it not being charity. Look at the original post, where Nate says he was inspired by Chris Anderson’s book Free. Which, if you bother to click the link, you’ll see is a book about how to make money from giving things away. Another good example of SparkFun being honest about the fact they’re here to sell you things - if you couldn’t work that out for yourself.

+1 on the 3am in Australia. I’m pretty tempted to get some family to do my order for me in Western Australia - only midnight there. The prospect of getting $100 worth of 5mm LEDs instead of xBees makes me think twice though…

While I don’t need this kit, I really like the way you’re dealing with the kit in the ordering system. It makes such perfect sense to have it orderable as a single item, while being able to add and remove individual components as required. Very nice.

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